


We've Got Time

by acedavestrider



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Stargazing, gratuitous descriptions of stars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 02:58:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21246362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acedavestrider/pseuds/acedavestrider
Summary: He’s very pointedly trying not to smile, trying not to give you the satisfaction of knowing you made him smile, but his eyes completely give him away. They’re far too fond to give any sort of impression other than absolutely smitten, regardless of how hard he’s trying to seem annoyed, and the way he blinks at you - quickly like he’s trying to clear his vision, like he’s trying to figure out if you’re real or if he’s imagining you - is enough to make your heart swoop in your chest.





	We've Got Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [poyitjdr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/poyitjdr/gifts).

> for my good pal riley for their birthday!! they requested stargazing
> 
> everyone say thank u riley

Karkat has never seen the stars. He makes this exceptionally clear during the first calm night you spend on the new planet, finally settled into your shared house after several long weeks of accelerating the development of a few new species and setting up an entire world government. You find him staring up at the sky, standing barefoot on the balcony with his neck craned towards the stars, and he doesn’t react to you opening and closing the sliding glass door. 

When you ask him what he’s doing, he says, “I’m looking at the stars, dipshit,” and not much else. You join him outside, your hands close to his on the railing, not quite touching, and tilt your head back to take a good look at the bright, probably long dead specs dotting the night sky. 

There are more stars on this planet than you’ve ever seen on earth, and whether that's because this solar system just has more stars in general or because Texas had insane pollution isn’t clear to you. The handful of stars you managed to glimpse back home are nothing in comparison to the thousands you’re peeping now, so many that it almost makes you go cross-eyed if you stare at them for too long. 

“We didn’t have these back home,” Karkat mutters, mostly to himself. 

A world without stars doesn’t make any sense to you, like cosmically. You only later find out through some research and also Kanaya that Alternia just had a crazy thick atmosphere that made the planet just barely habitable in such close proximity to their sun, but which blotted out what little light the stars provided.

“That’s just about the saddest thing you’ve ever said,” you tell him. “I can look past the racial violence and intergalactic colonization and incestuous sex slurry that Alternia is known for, but I draw the fucking line at not having any stars.” 

“Thank god I’m in the company of someone with such a strong moral compass,” Karkat quips. “Pointing due north at all times, nevermind what morally confounding situation may arise to try and throw it off its course.” 

“It’s what I’m known for,” you joke. “I am truly the superior man.” 

Karkat’s only response is the flitting of his eyelashes against his cheeks as he blinks up at the sky in something you might call childlike wonder, if not for how ridiculous it sounds. His lips part just slightly, not enough to see his teeth but enough for you to notice, and his expression is so willfully unguarded that you almost have trouble catching your breath. 

“You’re gonna hurt your neck,” you say, just as he inclines his head farther back to get a better look at the stars directly above you. 

He doesn’t make any comments about your sudden exit from the balcony, or your subsequent return minutes later with some blankets and pillows. You set them up behind Karkat, far enough from the house that the roofline doesn’t obscure your view, and spend an unnecessary amount of time making sure your impromptu blanket pile is sufficiently cozy. Karkat doesn’t notice or care about what you’re doing until you poke him in the side. 

“It’s way easier to look at the stars when you’re layin’ down,” you tell him, gesturing to the blanket nest. “Comfier too.” 

You half expect him to make some sort of offhanded, annoyed comment about your shitting pile making skills, but instead he purses his lips like he hadn’t even though about laying down to begin with. He shuffles over to the haphazard bundle, careful not to get any splinters in his bare feet, and settles gingerly onto the soft fabric. 

You follow suit and make a big deal out of properly tucking one of the other blankets around him so he doesn’t get cold, earning a couple of swats in your general direction from his long-nailed hand. You endure the brief physical resistance for the time it takes you to make sure he’s reached maximum comfort, and only then do you lay down next to him and take in the view. 

It’s way better from your new vantage point, with your neck supported by a fluffy pillow and your side warm from Karkat’s proximity. You’re far enough from the big cities of the new planet to avoid any light pollution, and if you look hard enough, slightly unfocusing your eyes, you can spot milky swirls of the galaxy you now occupy. You realize suddenly that you have no idea what this solar system is like, what other planets might be nearby, what kind of celestial bodies loom over you. You were never much of a space guy, and to be honest you got kind of sick of it after hurtling through it on a meteor for three years, but you get the urge to learn more about the universe you’ve decided to inhabit, the universe you had a hand in creating. 

You turn to Karkat. “How’re you liking my pile?” you ask him. “Is it fluffy enough for you? Too fluffy? Have enough lumbar support?” 

He shifts in response, feeling his way around the blankets and pillows. “It’s decent,” he concludes after a moment. “Nowhere near the quality of an authentic Alternian pile, but it’s soft, and warm, at the very least.” 

“Sweet,” you say. “And I was right too, yeah? It’s way easier to look at the stars from here.” 

“Yeah,” Karkat mutters, but you don’t think he’s really hearing you. His eyes are still open wide, pupils dilated to receive as much light from the stars as possible in the otherwise pitch dark night. You can see them reflected in his irises, white and yellow pinpricks dotting dark brown that’s just starting to fleck with crimson. They flit around endlessly, taking in the sprawling sky, trying to catalogue every star cluster they come across in an energetic little dance. 

“They’re really pretty,” he says, as if just now realizing. 

You’re not looking at the sky when you say, “Yeah, they are,” but it goes unnoticed. 

The awe in his eyes, bright and buoyant, contorts into dark fear in a split second. His hand darts out to grab at your arm, nails digging into your skin, and he says in a coarse voice, “What the hell was that?” 

You finally turn back to look at the sky, but you don’t see anything of interest. “What was what?” 

“It was like a - wait there’s another one!” His other hand moves to point stiffly at a specific corner of the sky, and you just manage to catch a glimpse of what he’s talking about. It’s a flashing white streak that briefly interrupts the dense blanket of stars, just bright enough that it draws your eye to where Karkat is pointing. 

“Oh dude, it’s just a shooting star,” you say. 

He turns to glare at you. “Don’t make shit up.”

Your shoulders shrug up in defense. “I’m not making it up,” you promise. “Some dipshit actually decided to call them that like however many hundreds of years ago.” 

“Well what the fuck are they?” 

“It’s like, uh…” You realize that you have no fucking idea what a shooting star actually is, beyond a bright thing in the sky that happens sometimes and has kind of a dumb name. 

Your internet search query of “what in the fuck is a shooting star actually” thankfully yields helpful results within a few seconds. 

“It’s just a bunch of fuckin’ dust,” you explain to him, “burning up in the atmosphere when the planet travels through a big ass cloud of it. Man that’s kinda lame, huh? Humans would wish on these fucking things.” 

“Not the dumbest thing humans have done,” Karkat muses easily, though his hand is still gripping the sleeve of your shirt. “So it’s really just dust?” 

“Yeah,” you confirm after scrolling for another moment. “Well I guess it’s actually more like a giant fireball, but the fireball is from the dust. Apparently there’s gonna be a lot of them tonight.” 

“Oh,” Karkat says quietly. The warmth of his hand has begun to soak into your arm and two more meteors have streaked past by the time he says, “It just looked like… a ship. Or something.” 

You hum at this in the same moment that Karkat’s hand trails down your arm and curls around your fingers. It's clammy, and you can just see out of the corner of your eye the way he's visibly trying to control his breathing. 

You guess you can understand his anxiety, in some way; you're just not sure if the panic-inducing fear you can plainly see on his face is a residual effect of being in the game or a leftover worry of being a mutant on Alternia. Either way, you're not exactly a huge fan of seeing Karkat's fight or flight instinct so easily triggered, seeing his brows knit in discontent and feeling his sweaty palm start to shake in yours. 

"Hey y'know what I just realized?" you offer into the silence. "We've gotta make up new constellations." 

Karkat scoffs but there's no bite in it. "Those ridiculous little pictures you put in the sky?"

"Well I didn't put 'em there," you correct. "It was like the Romans or something? They didn't have the internet or anything so they had to entertain themselves somehow, right? Might as well play a giant, cosmic game of connect-the-dots."

“Guess that explains why they were based on such useless, asinine shit,” he retorts. “Like wow, a giant fish in the sky, how fucking remarkable! Let’s make the next several a series of increasingly large hoofbeasts because those are the animals we specifically want to see hovering over our fragile pink bodies at night.” 

“Some of those stupid pictures were based off of trolls, last time I checked,” you point out. “You know cancer? The crab? That’s you, babe.” 

"Wow, I wonder why it was called cancer," he muses sourly. 

You frown at his tone, the way he still seems to be blaming himself for the untimely demise of your entire universe. It’s not his fault by any means, which you’ve told him several times over in the past, but you can tell it still fucks him up sometimes. 

"Hey if it makes you feel any better," you start, "Sollux's is just like… a couple dudes holding hands." 

Karkat's confused "What?" is tinged with the sound of a smile on his face, just barely concealed behind pursed lips. 

"Yeah it's literally just some stick dudes standing together," you explain with a grin. "Based on some ancient mythological twins or something lame like that." 

Karkat shifts a little next to you, gives your hand a gentle squeeze. "It's what he deserves."

“Yours is way better,” you agree. 

You lay in silence for a bit, holding hands and watching meteors pass by every few minutes. Karkat has calmed down in the interim and is looking dazzled by the stars again, eyes flicking around trying to spot as many meteors as he can. The stars don’t interest you much, not when Karkat’s next to you with an expression like he just became self-aware in this very moment, and is slowly coming to terms with his existence as a tiny being underneath a huge cosmic kaleidoscope of shit you can’t even begin to understand. 

He eventually opens his mouth to speak again, and you think he might be about to bitch at you for openly staring at him for the past few minutes, but instead he just says, “If your planet had constellations of trolls, shouldn’t this planet have constellations of humans?” 

You emphasize your shrug with a noncommittal grunt. “Dunno,” you say. “I mean, y’all kinda had a huge important part in making this place and preventing the complete extinction of several different species, so if you’re asking me I’d say that deserves a constellation or two. Maybe even three.” 

Karkat rolls his eyes. “Maybe you can let Kanaya have one, at least,” he offers. “She was responsible for making sure we didn’t massively fuck up the genesis frog this time around. And the whole thing with the mother orb…” 

“That is a point in her favor,” you agree. “But you gotta get one too, dude. It’s only fair.” 

“I don’t fucking think so,” he argues. “The last planet that had any sort of vague representation of me in their cultural history was completely decimated as a result, along with the entire fucking universe that it inhabited. I’ll be fucked sideways if I curse another planet, which, by the way, we only just finished creating after nearly dying a few dozen times, by for some reason allowing anyone to recreate my visage in the sky in any shape or form, abstract or otherwise.” 

“Babe no, look, I’m not gonna stand for this kind of insidious slander against you, this complete defamation of your otherwise impeccable character, I will not sit quietly and listen to this  _ unbelievable denigration of your- _ ”

“Holy shit, Dave,” he interrupts, but it only briefly disturbs your rant, which can’t be derailed until you make your fucking point. 

“No, listen,” you insist. “You deserve to be portrayed in every damn star in this solar system, and if the sky was painted with pictures of you then I could sleep soundly at night knowing you were watching over me with your huge, perfect, angry face, making sure I’m getting that good REM sleep and not staying up too late or eating Doritoes at three in the morning like I gotta do sometimes.” 

“We live together,” he points out exasperatedly. “I already do all of those things.” 

“Yeah but think of it on like… a  _ cosmic  _ scale,” you continue. “Your bitching is already so goddamn formidable, now just imagine if you could bitch at me  _ from the sky _ . Tell me that’s not appealing to you. Tell me that’s not your greatest dream.” 

“Okay, I  _ guess- _ ”

“And also,” you interrupt, “you’re more deserving of a place in the sky than anyone I know, save for maybe the Mayor but that’s a given and absolutely goes without saying. You know how balls to the wall, downright fucking  _ delighted  _ I’d be to see you in the stars every night? You gotta lemme have this.” 

Karkat refuses to look at you, staring stubbornly at the sky in an attempt to avoid your gaze, mouth pressed into a thin line. You can’t tell if the smattering of pink you’re seeing on his cheeks and over his nose is more from embarrassment at your declaration or exasperation at your unrelenting insistence on the matter. He’s still holding your hand but his fingers have gone lax and you have to squeeze his palm to get his attention back. 

“I’ll let you pick what star cluster you want,” you offer. 

He finally turns to you, concedingly and not without hesitation, and the look on his face makes you grin. He’s very pointedly trying not to smile, trying not to give you the satisfaction of  _ knowing  _ you made him smile, but his eyes completely give him away. They’re far too fond to give any sort of impression other than absolutely smitten, regardless of how hard he’s trying to seem annoyed, and the way he blinks at you - quickly like he’s trying to clear his vision, like he’s trying to figure out if you’re real or if he’s imagining you - is enough to make your heart swoop in your chest. 

You haven’t really talked about it, about the two of you. You haven’t exactly had the time to hash out a feelings jam in the last few months, not between all of the incredibly dangerous and arduous fighting and then eventual rebuilding of your entire respective civilizations. Maybe somewhere during your three year journey on the meteor you could’ve made more of an effort about it, but you were both kind of in the middle of your own sexuailty crises, which didn’t exactly lend to open and honest conversations between the two of you. 

There’s only so much to talk about, you think. You’ve both managed to get your heads out of your asses for just long enough to make some progress, to be comfortable with things like holding hands or cuddling under a couple blankets on your front patio in the middle of the night. You can compliment each other without needing to mask it in feigned annoyance or irony, and you’re getting to the point where you feel safe taking off your shades around him. 

You’ve kissed him a few times - once accidentally, another when you were about to fight Lord English, and once more immediately after surviving the aforementioned fight. It hasn’t really come up, but you’re pretty confident that Karkat’s the only person you want to be kissing anytime soon. You can only hope he’s on the same page as you. 

“I want that one,” he says suddenly, pulling you out of your thoughts with an arm outstretched toward the sky. 

“Which one?” you say, trying to follow his line of sight. “Is it the group that looks like an amorphous blob or the one that looks like someone spilled table salt? Maybe the one that looks like a bunch of airholes poked into a container?” 

“No, asshole,” he grabs your chin and points your head in the direction he wants, “that one.” 

You have to squint a little, but you can start to see what he does once he starts describing the shape to you. He says it’s an oval with two triangles on it, tilted slightly to the left and a little oblong, a little uneven. There are a few stars dotting the inside of the shape, one much brighter than the others, one of the brightest that you can see from the patio. 

“That’s a pretty choice cluster of stars, babe,” you say. “You’re taking up all the prime real estate, every other prominent cultural figure on this planet is gonna have to deal with second best.” 

“Let’s find yours,” he says. 

“Nah.” Convincing Karkat he’s worthy of a constellation is a hill you’re willing to die on, but whether or not  _ you  _ deserve one is still up for debate. “I’ll just be one of the stars inside your group, maybe that sparkly little beauty mark on your cheek, all twinkling and shit like it owns the place.” 

He sighs, “Fine.” 

“It’s official then,” you say with a snap of your fingers. “I’ll call the others and put together a divine mandate about it so that we can get all of our citizens up to speed, maybe organize some sort of global holiday for it where everyone has to worship your constellation by saying fuck way more often than they normally would.” 

“Shut the fuck up,” he instructs, adding to his point by settling into the comfort of your side, done talking for the night. 

You press your cheek against the side of his head, careful not to bump his horns, and watch the sky above you, meteors passing by every few minutes or so. Karkat is warm and pliable against you, responding to your hand rubbing his back with little clicks in the back of his throat. The two of you lay there in relative silence for far too long, and only manage to drag yourselves to bed sometime around two in the morning. 

Despite the idea of a Karkat constellation being a bit of a joke initially, it becomes more of a staple for you over time. On clear nights when you find yourselves out on the patio again, you’ll point it out to Karkat just to make him blush and smack you in the arm, only to catch him off guard when you pull him against you a moment later. 

Time passes but the stars don’t change. You kiss Karkat quite a few more times, get rid of your respective beds to buy one big mattress, and retire your sunglasses to a spot on your bedside table for the foreseeable future. Things get a little more comfortable, your house more like a home, and your life starts to span out before you, for once without a visible and permanent ending. 

Karkat gets involved in activism, and sometimes gets called to the other kingdoms for work that he swears up and down has no political or diplomatic hue to it, though you don’t really believe him. Some events will have him away from home for days at a time, and you’ll stand on the balcony with your phone to your ear and tell him, your face pointed to the sky, “I can still see you.” He’ll do the same when you’re away, text you just to say that he’s watching you dick around, that you need to get some sleep. 

You still come out to the patio together sometimes, just to make a pile of blankets on the ground and stare up at the sky for hours at a time. Karkat’s starry visage isn’t always visible depending on the season, but when it is you’re sure to point it out to him, pepper him with kisses about it until he’s flushed and laughing. You get more engrossed in one another than whatever celestial events might be occurring in the sky, but the stars revolve around you regardless, thousands of twinkling lights keeping watch while you and Karkat fall a little more in love with each other. 

**Author's Note:**

> i dont actually Know Stuff about Space Things so if this shit didnt make any sense well i never claimed to be an expert
> 
> this was fun though! fluffy and plotless just how i like it
> 
> hope yall liked it, leave a comment if ur in the mood


End file.
